by Brian Eames
“Is there somebody up there named Nanny?” the boy said. Nelson and Chock-ti looked at each other, shaking their heads in disbelief. The old lady was right!
“She is some kind of witch, that Nanny,” said Nelson.
Chock-ti cupped a hand to his cheek.
“Keep walking!” he called down to them. “We meet you down there.”
The little boy smiled, and the young man waved up at them.
* * *
CHAPTER 35:
* * *
Birthright
“What troubles you?” Van said. He had handed off the cutlass to Akin and lagged behind for the others to pass him until Kitto drew near. Van’s shirt was soaked through, as was Kitto’s, although the sun had yet to reach its zenith. Kitto stalked past Van, then whirled.
“Do you remember your parents, Van?” Kitto said. “Your mum or dad?” Van drew back in surprise.
“Not so much,” he said warily.
“What if you could?” Kitto pressed. “Or what if you discovered they were people you could never respect? That they repulsed you, even.”
“Why you asking a thing like that?” Van said. Their eyes locked, each pair afire with a touch of anger.
“Would it change you?”
Silence surrounded them for several seconds before Van answered.
“Would it change me?”
“How would it change you?”
Van considered. The anger drained from him as he stared at the trodden leaves beneath his feet. Could Kitto know what I know?
At last he answered.
“I believe in what I am doing,” he said. “I believe in you and your mum and Duck, wherever he is. And I believe that . . . just maybe . . . all this could help my sister someday. So, no . . .” He lifted his head and met Kitto’s gaze. “Not a whit would it change me. My parents delivered me here, but what I do here on rests on my own shoulders.”
Kitto nodded, and not it was his turn to stare down at the mat of hewn palm leaves below.
Does it not matter where I am from? he asked himself. Can a boy—can a man—stand apart from those who brought him into the world?
“Now, why you asking me all this?” Van snapped.
Kitto turned away and began to walk on.
“Nothing,” he said. Van stepped in behind him.
“You are not any good at lying, Kitto,” Van said. “You have hardly said two words since you awoke. What, are you jealous seeing your mum carrying Bucket?”
Twenty yards ahead they could see Sarah trudging along the rough-hewn path behind X, Bucket’s little feet poking out to one side.
“Of course not.” Kitto spoke the truth. Bucket was magical for Sarah. Kitto could see that. Somehow the pain of Sarah’s anxiety over Duck was lessened when she cared for the baby. “Bucket is a blessing for her. I would never want it different.”
“What then?”
“I do not want to speak of it.”
“Perhaps that is why you should.” Van knew what it was like to carry the burden of a secret.
“I saw something X has,” Kitto said. “I . . .” He stopped, fearful of saying it aloud, that somehow when he did so it would become more real. “I keep learning things about myself, and they keep getting more and more nasty,” Kitto said. Behind him the sounds of Van’s footsteps ceased. Kitto turned.
“Did X tell you then?” Van said. Kitto felt a tingle of goose bumps rise up the back of his neck.
“Did X tell me what?” Kitto said. Van stared back at him, then looked down with something like guilt written on his face.
“Do you know about it?” Kitto said. “How could you know of it?”
Van dragged a toe against a root. “Before we reached Falmouth, I overheard the captain. Your uncle, I mean. He was speaking with Peterson. They did not know I was there.”
“So my uncle knew too?” Kitto said, feeling his heat rise, and he welcomed it. Anger was easier to feel than fear. “Of course he did! He would had to have known!” Kitto turned back in the direction of the others, now some fifty yards ahead.
“Stop!” he shouted. From the sash belt about his waist he withdrew the dagger his father had given him. His father?
Kitto ran forward awkwardly, stumbling and shouting for Exquemelin to halt.
“Kitto, wait!” Van called from behind him, but Kitto charged blindly on. The ground went fuzzy on him, but he did not bother to wipe away the tears. He rushed toward Sarah and Ontoquas, who stood staring at him in shock and dismay.
“Kitto, what is wrong?” Sarah said. She thrust Bucket into Ontoquas’s arms and reached to take him by the shoulders. Kitto reeled back from her touch.
“Did . . . did you know?” Kitto said to her.
Sarah shook her head, bewildered. “Whatever do you mean? Did I know what?”
“Did you know!” Kitto screamed. “All this time, did you know?” Sarah turned toward Exquemelin, who watched with grim aspect several yards ahead, sweat dripping from his nose. Akin looked on with the cutlass slung over his shoulder.
“Did you?” Kitto said again. Sarah raised her hands.
“I have kept nothing from you, Kitto! I keep nothing from you. What is it you are asking of me?” The acute pain in Sarah’s face made Kitto feel a pang of shame. He turned to Exquemelin, and strode forward to him.
“You knew,” Kitto said softly, holding out the dagger like an accusing finger.
X removed his hat and hung it on a cleaved branch. He wiped the arm of his shirt against his brow.
“If I knew, you will stab me with this thing?” He shrugged. “Ja, ja, I knew,” he said. “Anyone close to Morgan knew.” He looked past Kitto’s shoulder to send a menacing look to Van. “And it was not for you to tell him!”
“I didn’t!” Van said.
“You fell asleep among your papers last night,” Kitto said. “I looked through them.” Kitto lowered the dagger and held out his other hand. “Give it to me. It belongs to me more than it does you.”
Sarah stepped over to them. “What on earth is going on here? What is it that you have, sir?” she demanded.
Exquemelin wiped sweat away from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt and gave out a sigh. Draped over his shoulders were two leather satchels. He fumbled with the latches. In a moment he had transferred some of the materials from one to the other, then handed one satchel over to Kitto by its strap.
Kitto opened the hasp and withdrew the single sheet of paper inside. He held it out to Sarah, who snatched it up and began to pore over its contents.
“I do not understand,” she said. “What is the import of this?” She looked up at Kitto, still mystified.
“Look at the date,” Kitto said.
Sarah returned to the top of the page. “Twenty-two November, the year 1665. I still don’t see . . .”
“What happened about ten months after that date?” Kitto waited until he saw the realization hit her. Sarah lowered the page, and turned a look of great empathy on Kitto.
“Oh, Kitto! Is this . . . is this your mother? I did not know her name was Carter. Oh, Kitto.” Sarah covered her mouth with her hand, aghast.
Kitto probed her expression, looking for the slightest hint of guile, while also knowing Sarah was never capable of such.
“You never knew? Father never told you?”
Sarah shook her head slowly. “Never.” She reached forward and took Kitto’s face in her hands. “You were his son, Kitto. That is the only way he ever thought of you.”
Kitto pulled from her hand the piece of paper still pinched between her fingers.
“Apparently not,” he said bitterly. “I am the son of Henry Morgan,” he said. “Henry Morgan is my father. And my ruin. And now I am going to seek him out.”
* * *
CHAPTER 36:
* * *
The Path
Eventually the party had continued to hike, at Kitto’s insistence. There was little more to say. Exquemelin apologized to Kitto for keeping the information from him. H
e had not realized at first that Kitto did not already know. Surely William would have told him! When he came to realize that Kitto did not know the truth of his parentage, he did not believe he was the person to break such news.
Kitto’s rage had quieted, but it was replaced by an unsettling fear. He trudged on through the jungle trying to grapple with it.
Henry Morgan is my father? And my mother married that villain? Who am I, then?
Who am I?
The party hiked on in stony silence a few miles until they stumbled across a pleasant creek from which they drank deeply. Kitto kept his distance from the others, his head a swirl of conflicting thoughts and uncertainties. X blundered off into the brush beyond the far bank of the creek after sniffing the air, and in a moment he was hailing them all jubilantly.
“Ja, ja, ja! This is it! I have found it!” He burst through a brace of thick leaves, the gold tooth shimmering in his grin.
“What’s that?” Van said.
Exquemelin pointed with the machete. “The path!” he said. “We are not far now. If we hurry, we can make it to the camp before nightfall.” He turned toward the wood and raised a hand to his cheek. “I am coming to you, my sweet Nanny!” X howled out into the jungle.
Onward they trudged, the way much easier now that they did not need to clear a path as they went. The trail itself was quite narrow and nearly swallowed up in undergrowth in places, but X practically galloped along it, never once concerned that he might lose his way. He rushed ahead and then waited impatiently at a turn or the top of a rise for the others, tugging savagely at the beads of his beard. The rest of the party struggled to keep up.
After several miles Sarah insisted that they take a break. Bucket needed to eat something and his undergarments needed cleaning. X relented, chewing on his finger as Sarah knelt in the stream that the path had crossed several times over the last few miles. Bucket gummed at a piece of biscuit soaked in water and some coconut, reaching out to the food Ontoquas held before him in cupped hands.
“The food is about to get much better, my boy!” X said, grinning. “My Nanny, she can cook.”
“She is . . . she is your wife?” Sarah said, rising from the streambed.
“She is my love,” X said. “My raison d’être. And the reason I will never be anything but a pirate.”
“I would think most women would desire that you take a less dangerous line of work,” Sarah said, wringing out the wet cloth.
“She does worry for me. But she needs me to continue. So much of what she does depends on my work,” X said, stroking his beads. “If I could just convince her to give it up, then we could be together so much more.”
“And what is this work that she does?” Sarah said.
X smiled at her. “We wait. Soon you will have your answer to that.”
Kitto stepped forward. He said nothing, but stroked his hand lightly over the top of Bucket’s head.
“His hair is getting longer,” he said. It was true. The tight black curls that had hugged so close to the baby’s scalp were thickening into an opaque fringe. Sarah smiled down at the baby in the crook of Ontoquas’s arm. He looked up at Sarah with watery black eyes.
“Heh! Heh!” Bucket said, and grinned a wide, toothless smile.
“Bucket will never know who his parents were,” Kitto said. Sarah looked up at him. “I suppose I should feel lucky.”
“You have had two mothers who loved you, Kitto, and one father who loved you and who was there for you. That the man who sired you is fearful, evil even, does not reflect upon you.”
X stroked his beads and nodded thoughtfully. “My own father, he was a demon. I would have been better raised by wolves.” He rose to walk away, not feeling that such a discussion was welcome to him, but Kitto’s words stopped him.
“I wonder if it was my clubfoot that drove him away.”
X cleared his throat and turned. He made his way back over to Kitto, sitting down in the path next to Bucket, who he chucked under the chin.
“Your mother was common, Kitto. Low, even. Morgan married her in secret, perhaps because he was already troubled by her status. John Morris berated Morgan for it, told him he would regret the decision. So, by the time you were born, Morgan was already putting some distance between himself and Mercy.”
“And then after?” Kitto said. X nodded.
“After you arrived, he took steps,” X said. “He had me break into the clerk’s office and steal the certificate of marriage. I did—along with some other documents I found.” X winked. “I showed Morgan some blackened parchment and told him I had burned it.”
“Why did you lie to him?” Sarah said. “Why not just do as he asked?”
X ran his fingers along the curves of his black hat. “I knew then,” he said. “I knew that if Morgan were a man to turn his back on his love—on his own son, even—to improve his state in the world, he would not hesitate to turn his back on me someday as well.”
Kitto was silent a moment. So there it is. My father by birth abandoned me because of my twisted foot. And the father who raised me, the one I spent much of my life resenting, he took me in. Even with my clubfoot, even being the son of another man . . . he took me in and loved me.
The knowledge was awful and unforgiving and true. He turned back to Exquemelin.
“So you kept the documents to use against Morgan someday?” Kitto said.
“If necessary, oui.”
“I would like to see that happen.”
Van and Akin wandered back to them from where they had dangled their feet in the cool water of the creek.
“About ready?” Van said. He smiled at Kitto, searching his face for some clue as to his mood, glad to see that Kitto seemed less dark of aspect.
Kitto looked to his friends, at this eccentric pirate before him, and at his mother—yes, she was his true mother, his parent, more so than either of his fathers.
“Thank you, Mother,” he said softly.
Sarah searched his eyes questioningly, then she nodded in understanding.
“No. Thank you, son.”
* * *
CHAPTER 37:
* * *
Reunion
Three hours later the party ascended slowly through a switchback pass when from far up the slope came the sound of two voices shouting.
“X is here! X! The pirate is returned!”
“What in the world?” Van said, holding up the cutlass in alarm.
Two dark-skinned young men clad in nothing but breeches came hurtling down the mountainside. They held weathered muskets over their heads as they ran headlong through the brush, ignoring the switchbacks of the path and instead launching themselves through the air with abandon.
“I hope those are friends,” Van said.
X let out a whoop.
“We thought you dead! Huzzah!” one shouted.
“I am too pigheaded to die!” X shouted back at them, laughing and holding his arms wide. The first man broke through the brush near them, tossed his musket to the ground on his last step, and without slowing launched himself into Exquemelin. The two tumbled together off the trail, X swearing and laughing.
The second man caught up, fired his musket into the air, tossed it aside, and threw himself into the tumult. The embrace evolved into a wrestling match, the younger men pummeling Exquemelin while the captain attempted to put them each into headlocks.
“As odd as I would have expected,” Kitto said.
Finally the three wrestlers collapsed in a heap of groans and giggles.
“I am too old!” X yelled up to the treetops from where he lay on his back. Akin stepped forward to retrieve the captain’s hat, which had been knocked well down the slope. The two young men, all smiles, pulled X to his feet and helped him back up to the path where Kitto and Sarah and Ontoquas watched, wide-eyed.
“Introduce yourselves, you knaves,” X said, sweeping out an arm. The one who had tackled Exquemelin stepped forward. He was the younger of the two, dimples set into his brigh
t cheeks.
“I am Amos,” he said. “And this one is Joseph,” he said, thumbing to the other man, whose features seemed carved from a slice of onyx, lean and strong. He gave them something of a salute with his smile.
“We know the pirate,” Joseph said, as if to explain their antics.
“Sadly, this is true.” X introduced his companions, and Amos and Joseph hugged each of them in turn as if they were old friends. Akin they lifted up in their embrace and slapped his shoulders as if he were a brother, and Akin looked so happy he might burst. Then the young men crowded around the baby in Sarah’s arms and cooed in wonder.
“Ooh, Nanny loves a baby!” Joseph said. “Where you get this baby, X? You steal him away?”
“Not me. That one.” X pointed to Ontoquas, who stood her ground and held her head high.
“You Arawak?” Amos said, naming the tribes he knew. “Carib?”
Ontoquas shook her head. “Wampanoag,” she said.
Amos shrugged. “You saved the baby?”
Ontoquas nodded. “We were on a slave ship,” she said quietly. “We jumped.”
Amos smiled wide and clapped his hands. “Then I love you!” he said. “And your baby! And Nanny, she going to love you too.”
“How far are we, mes frères? These old legs grow tired,” X said.
Without another word Joseph gathered up all their meager bundles into his hands and Amos reached to take Bucket from Sarah with a smile.
“No, you mustn’t,” she said, but Amos had already snatched him from her weary arms. He spun the little baby skillfully so that Bucket perched in the crook of his elbow looking out.
“I am good with the babies!” Amos said. “They love me!”
Seeing Bucket’s dark skin against Amos’s, nearly the same tone, Sarah felt a momentary pang of sadness that she did not quite understand. She forced herself to smile.